


Transmutation

by starlady



Series: Synthesis [2]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Assassination, Canon Disabled Character, Multi, Reconciliation, They keep killing Senator Kelly, past trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-02-20
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-31 11:51:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/343733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlady/pseuds/starlady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Various additional scenes from the Synthesis timeline, or, the alchemical process of creating something new out of disunified fragments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1968

**Author's Note:**

> I'm adding characters, relationships, and warnings as I go. "Violence" is for Chapter 1.

i.  
None of which is to say that Charles' hopes for secrecy are achieved without blood. It's not mutant blood, though, which is all Erik cares about.

One of the world's intelligence agencies finds them in the summer of 1968. At the time, all Erik knows is that he and Emma are sitting in Emma's office--Erik has a desk in Charles' massive study that he hardly ever uses--going over the school accounts one afternoon when they both hear him, as clear as if he'd been in the next room, _Intruders! Tennis courts! Now!_

Erik and Emma take a split second to look at each other, and then Erik's knocked his chair over and Emma is vaulting over her desk and they're heading pell-mell for the door, Emma shouting, _Charles, we're on our way!_ "loud" enough for Erik to hear.

They run down the halls as fast as they can, Erik taking the lead but Emma keeping up grimly--how the hell she can run in those idiotic high heels, he has no idea, maybe she's turned her ankles to diamond--and take the stairs two at a time, heading for the grounds to the rear of the house. Erik is reasonably confident that Charles can keep himself alive, but he knows from experience that one against however many is only good odds for assassinations.

It's one against three, Erik sees when they turn onto the drive leading to the tennis courts, Charles' mouth set in a grim line as he keeps three men--dark suits, dark hair, sunglasses, no distinguishing characteristics--from seeing him while they slowly advance up the path, guns drawn in the low ready, covering each other. They're nearly past Charles, but his concentration breaks at the crunch of Erik and Emma's running feet on the gravel and the agents instantly react, realigning the points of their triangle to get a bead on each of them.

Erik can see them making the threat assessment--guy in a wheelchair, woman in heels, and him, no visible weapons between them--and they make the logical but flawed decision of focusing on him, raising their weapons to the lines of their shoulders and firing without any further ado. But Erik simply raises a hand and the bullets stop in mid-air; either uncomprehending or out of habit, the agents keep firing, emptying their clips.

Stupid. Erik clenches his fist, and the guns crumple into useless scrap. All three drop their weapons, and the two in the lead rush Erik; the third draws a knife and raises his hand to throw it at Emma, who turns adamant the instant after it's flung. Erik registers the blade clattering off her body and realizes that the knife is _ceramic_ just before the first two are on him.

It's been too long since he's fought for his life hand-to-hand, and the first one slashes the top of his arm before Erik can overpower him, forcing the knife out of his hand while he turns his attention to the iron in the man's blood, giving him a brain aneurysm. Erik's control of this technique isn't perfect yet, and there's a lot of stray blood from the man's eyes and nose as he drops to the ground with a gurgle, but Erik isn't paying attention. The second agent punches him full in the jaw, and Erik spits blood after he lands on the ground and rolls, shouting, _"Emma!"_ Still on the ground, he sweeps the man's legs out from under him, and when the agent falls he doesn't get back up, his expression comically surprised and then outraged and, underneath, frightened.

Erik pushes himself to his feet, gravel digging into his palms, and sees that between them Charles and Emma have the other agent immobilized too. The humans are fighting it, he'll give them that much, but they're simply no match for people who are more than human, and telepaths at that. Cutting the straining tendons in the neck of the one halfway to Charles would be too much effort; Erik simply stabs him in the heart and twists the blade for good measure, stepping aside to avoid the gusher. Gouts of crimson splash his shoes even so, and he turns in time to see Emma stalking forward, fully diamond. Her gemstone body sparkles brilliantly in the dying sun, and Erik takes a moment to appreciate again the beauty of mutation.

Charles isn't wrong about that; it is indeed quite groovy.

Emma Frost is not one of the world's natural-born killers, but killing someone who's being held prone isn't all that difficult, and she has the willpower and the detachment necessary in spades. Off to his side, Charles flinches when her single blow staves the man's skull in, but he doesn't say anything against it.

Erik, breathing deeply, looks over at Charles. "Are you all right?" he asks, and when Charles nods impatiently, "Tell me you read them." As an afterthought, he drags the back of his hand across his mouth; it comes away bloodied.

"I got a lot," Charles sighs. "I'll tell you all of it."

"Good," Erik says, and looks toward Emma. "Nicely done."

"You're welcome," she says, shifting back to flesh and crouching down to wipe her gore-covered hand on one of the bodies. There are drops of blood on her shoes, and flecked across her top and midriff as well.

Erik realizes, belatedly, that they've gathered a crowd; most of the school's admittedly small population is standing in a rough semi-circle three meters up the drive, looking alternately spooked and incensed. They're all looking to Erik, who's still bleeding slowly from his arm and whose mouth hurts like hell now that he has attention to spare for the throbbing pain; he's torn the inside of his cheek and lips on his teeth, and there's blood in his mouth again.

Even Charles and Emma seem to be waiting for him to say something, and Erik resists the urge to grind his teeth or to swear out of sheer will. It's not like his views have suddenly changed, or that they don't all know what he thinks already. Instead, he spits out blood again and says, looking up at their students, "You see what they're doing. It won't stop if it goes unpunished. Tomorrow, we're going hunting."

He can hear his accent thickening noticeably on the words, and he sees their students, and the teachers, exchanging glances. He learned his English in the Republic, and the Irish edge comes back whenever he’s truly agitated; no one who was there can quite forget when they first heard it, on a deceptively beautiful tropical beach.

It's appalling that they're not enraged too, but that will probably come after the fear, and right now Erik doesn’t have the energy to spare to be angry at his fellow mutants as well as the humans.

There's a short silence, and then Beast steps forward. "What about the bodies?" he asks.

"Get Havok to vaporize them," Erik says, "check them for anything that might tell us something first." He changes his mind and turns and leans down and kisses Charles, who gets a surprisingly tight grip on the back of his skull but doesn't do more than caress the edges of Erik's mind, which is probably for the best. At the moment, there's no way Erik would be able to keep himself from practically shouting _I told you so_.

Not that Charles doesn't know he's thinking that already. There's blood on Charles' mouth when Erik pulls back, but his eyes are clear when he meets Erik's gaze. Charles has never been shy about defending what they're building here. "I'm going to find Elixir," Erik says, holding up his arm; "he can use the practice."

 

ii.

Emma finds him about an hour after Elixir's finished patching Erik up, with a gratifying minimum of fussing and "you should be more careful!" lectures. The skin on his arm and on the inside of his cheek is still slightly tender, but Erik knows from experience that he'll be fine in the morning, and he won't scar. That, he almost regrets, but he's fairly certain there are other injuries in his future that will.

"They were MI-6," Emma tells him, and hands him a folder with notes and photos and mimeographs of typewritten pages inside it. They're in Charles' office, at Erik's desk, and Erik sits down in his chair, spreading the clippings out in front of him. Emma keeps her feet, her arms crossed in front of her and her face set in a study of grim lines. Another woman would pace, but Emma Frost isn't any other woman.

it doesn't take Erik long to flip through the information and absorb the important points; the conclusion he comes to was foregone the moment the agents set foot on the grounds. "London, then," he says, and looks up at her. "I want you and Havok ready to go at 7am tomorrow. Pack for four or five days; this won't take longer than that."

"Do you think Havok will be up for this?" Emma asks, frowning.

Erik shrugs. They've all been hardened in the past five years, but Beast isn’t suited for infiltration, Banshee's really still a kid, and the handful of other mutants they've managed to recruit are mostly too young or too inexperienced. He wishes he had Mystique or Azazel for this, but he hasn't heard from Raven in years, and he specifically saw her off without letting her give him a way to contact her. Erik doesn't trust Charles to do the right thing by her; he barely trusts himself. "If not, we'll see about someone else," he says, "or just do this with the two of us."

"And we're doing…?" Emma asks, raising one eyebrow eloquently. She swore to him that she'd follow no one blindly again when she accompanied him here, and she’s kept that promise.

Just as he’s upheld his half of the bargain, that he'd always listen to her. Erik meets her eyes; they're green and just as cold as his. He’s grown accustomed, in the nearly five years since, to taking her opinion very seriously indeed. "Find out what they know about us, remove all their files, and kill anyone we deem necessary along the way," he says, and she nods.

"Good," she says, with a certain hard satisfaction in her voice. "Do you want to find Havok, or shall I?"

She might as well have asked, _Do you want to fight with Charles now, or later?_ , and Erik is highly tempted to tell her that he'll go ask Havok along on this errand of vengeance personally. But he should probably save her offer to run interference between the two of them for some time when it's vital, as opposed to merely highly convenient.

"You find him," he tells her; "you know what to say," and she nods and stalks out. It takes a bit to realize when Emma Frost is angry, but Erik's known her long enough for now to recognize that she's furious. That's fair enough; so is he.

Charles rolls in half an hour later, when Erik is halfway through studying the folder's contents in full detail. Erik glances up at him, acknowledging his presence, but deliberately goes back to his reading. Charles pauses in the doorway for a long interval, and Erik can practically feel him "listening" to the silence. But he doesn't feel Charles poking around in his mind, which is a change that Erik can admit to himself he doesn't wholly welcome, as much as that disturbs him. He's gotten used to having Charles with him at some level, and Charles' burgeoning reticence about reaching out to him is unsettling.

It's something to talk about when he gets back, probably. Eventually, Charles asks, "When are you leaving?" in an admirably level voice.

"Tomorrow morning," Erik says; "we're flying out of Kennedy at noon." He's booked three first-class tickets on commercial transport, using accounts that he controls personally rather than funds that can be linked back to the school. The jet is not the thing for a low-key infiltration of MI-6's headquarters, and trying to take it to the UK would cause more problems than it would solve.

Charles is frowning, the thunderous expression that can terrorize recalcitrant students in full display, but Erik is mostly indifferent to it. "Do you really believe this is the most effective response?" Charles asks, which is not quite the question Erik had been expecting, and he lets out a breath to give himself time to reply.

"If there were more of us," he says carefully, "if the mutants here were older, more experienced--maybe not then. But as long as secrecy is still our modus operandi, Charles, no, I don't see any other way." He looks down again at the papers in front of him, but after a moment he yields to the tension and walks over to the floor-length windows on the office's other wall. The sun is setting over the grounds, out towards the lake, and Erik can't help but feel the mansion's vulnerability all over again. Secrecy is a pretty terrible defensive strategy when it comes right down to it; they're all going to have to work harder.

It would be so easy for Erik to create an army out here, to reshape their students to his will, especially since he teaches both history and what they euphemistically call "physical education." Erik knows how to break people; it was done to him, after all, and he's always been a quick study. But he'd sworn to Charles that he wouldn't, and Charles had promised that he wouldn't allow him to, do that. The method that respects people's free will and personalities is more time-consuming and less assured of success, but one of the few things Erik refuses to do is harm his own kind, and another is to abuse children.

Charles has wheeled over to join him. "I can't convince the world that mutants pose no threat to humans if mutants are killing humans in their strongholds," he says, looking out the window rather than at Erik.

"You can't convince the world of anything about mutants if all the mutants have already been murdered," Erik points out, pitching his voice to be mild and mostly failing.

Charles turns partially and looks up at him. "We're at an impasse," he observes redundantly, "again."

"We'll do our best to make it look normal," Erik tells him when the silence stretches, which is only partially true; they'll do their best to get in and out with as little trouble as possible. Much as Erik has no qualms about killing everyone in MI-6, annihilation is not terribly effective tactics.

There's a slight twist to Charles' expression that betrays the fact that he knows that Erik's humoring him, but he's clearly still somewhat shaken, because he doesn't make any other protest. "And you'll be careful," he says, what was intended as an imperative sounding more like an imprecation.

Careful doesn't enter into it for Erik, and they both know it, but one decided benefit of fulfilling his vendetta is that he's now better able to evaluate risks in any given situation, though that hasn't affected his habit of using every resource at his disposal, including himself, ruthlessly. "I'll try," he says, which they both know is the best Charles is going to get. _I'll come back_ , he says silently, which is the other part of it.

 _Yes, you will_ , Charles agrees, his habitual confidence filling his mental voice. He's manipulating Erik shamelessly, letting that seep through, but it's only attempted manipulation rather than the outright control which Charles is capable of but has forsworn. Erik recognizes it, and he’s able to at least partially resist it, as much as it appeals to him.

His life used to be simple; Erik wouldn't go back to that life for the world. He and Charles have the same idea simultaneously, and he leans down and Charles reaches up and kisses him hard, Erik going down on one knee to give Charles a better angle, opening his mouth when he feels Charles' teeth against his lips, and then his tongue. London will still be there in a few hours.

 

iii.  
Erik accepts a glass of champagne from the stewardess when he buckles into his seat and allows her to keep it refilled for the remainder of the flight, champagne being sufficiently out of character for him that he feels comfortable drinking it in a context in which he doesn't want to be remembered accurately. Emma has the window seat next to him, also drinking champagne on the grounds that if anyone asks they're a married couple taking a vacation to the land of his birth. Across the aisle, Havok is peaceably reading a paperback. They look like humans, which for Erik's present purposes is all to the good.

Unlike many people, Erik finds flying utterly relaxing. Far from claustrophobic, he feels more alive when completely surrounded by metal, and he'd have to be dead himself before he allowed an airplane carrying him to fall out of the sky. He isn't quite able to tune out his sense of metal enough to sleep well, unfortunately, but Emma and Havok both manage it, Emma's head falling sideways onto his shoulder. Erik doesn't disturb her; there are few people in the world he feels as comfortable with as Emma Frost. Really, there's Charles and Emma and that's about it, and in some respects he has more confidence in Emma than he ever can in Charles. He and Charles are simply too close.

They land in Heathrow without any need for Erik's intervention, and the three of them proceed to immigration smoothly, palming the passports Beast forged for them the night before and reciting their various lies to the inspectors with practiced bland expressions. Havok and Emma pass through without incident, but Erik, who's let his Irish accent recolonize his English to match the purported information in his documents, is unexpectedly directed into a side room and told, politely but firmly, to please wait.

It takes him a good two minutes, his mind racing, to realize that it's most likely not that they think he's a mutant or a Mossad agent; they think he's a _partisan_. The name on his passport reads Michael fucking Collins, after all, and suddenly Erik wants to punch himself. Half the Catholics in the North must be named Michael Collins, and half of them again are probably sympathizers. No wonder the Brits are giving him a more thorough screening; they can't hear the difference between his accent and the speech of someone who's actually _from_ the North, or they don’t care. To them, evidently, a Mick’s a Mick.

Idiots. They really ought to worry more about mutants than about Ulster separatists.

It's been nearly five minutes when he hears Emma's voice in his head. _Magneto, what's the problem?_ she asks, calm but not unconcerned.

 _They think I'm an Irish terrorist,_ Erik replies, and he can almost feel her frowning. Personally, it's all he can do to keep from laughing out loud, but admittedly he has an idiosyncratic sense of humor.

 _I'll take care of it_ , she says, and withdraws. A minute later, the inspector re-enters the room and returns his passport, apologizing profusely for the unspecified mistake. Erik assures the man that it was no trouble at all, really, and gets the hell out.

"Thanks," he tells Emma when they've cleared customs, tucking the passport back into the pocket of his jacket.

"You're welcome," she replies, expression unruffled beneath her white hat. Behind her, Havok frowns.

"I hope that's our only trouble for this trip," he says, hoisting his suitcase. The three of them are a good choice for this mission; Erik has no illusions about the ability of anyone to withstand torture, including himself, but Havok was put into solitary confinement voluntarily, and Emma survived two months on her own in the basement of Langley with relatively few ill effects. They have as good a chance as anyone of hanging on, in the event that they fail, until Erik's self-imposed five-day time limit expires and the mansion crew tries to break them out.

As back-up plans go, Erik's made do with worse, but it's obvious that they need more mutants, more allies, more time.

They don't have them; they're going to war with what they've got.

"I wouldn't bet on it," Erik says, and pretends not to see Havok rolling his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many, many thanks to wintercreek for the beta.


	2. 1982

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In 1982, Lorna has questions. Erik, reluctantly, has answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to cygnaut for looking this (ancient, ancient piece) over! As usual, all errors are my own.

Lorna Frost is fifteen when she knocks on the door of Charles' office and steps inside to find Erik, who's looking up from more damned paperwork over the frame of his reading glasses. "Lorna," he says, "Charles isn't here right now--"

"Dad," she says, closing the door behind her, "I'm not here to talk to Professor X."

Erik lets himself take a good look at this young woman, his daughter; she mostly takes after Emma, which is a guilty relief, but she has his eyes, and looking into his own eyes, but without his emotions or his experience behind him, had been just as disconcerting as if the mirror had started talking back to him, in the beginning. But it's no small miracle, too, that they could create an entirely new life between them, and he's grateful all over again to Emma, for giving him the experience. Someday, he should really tell her that specifically.

"No," he says, "I suppose you aren't." He closes the file he was reading and pulls out a chair for her with a gesture. "Would you like to sit down?"

"Okay." Lorna sits, her hands grasping her knees and her expression guardedly unhappy. Erik waits patiently; she's as smart as a whip, and she'd realized at a very young age that he was her father, just as Emma had predicted and Erik had feared. But she doesn't hate him, which is another miracle--Erik should just give up and admit that children, alone of human and mutantkind, retain the ability to surprise him--and she's never been embarrassed to claim him as her parent, either. Erik suspects Emma's hand in that, though he's never asked. Charles thinks differently, but he's also specifically not read Lorna's mind.

"Dad," she says at last, "I'm sorry, but I asked Mom, and she said to ask you. I have to--I have to ask you about the war, and, and--"

Erik closes his eyes. "The Shoah wasn't just the war, Lorna," he says. "The war wasn't even the start of it."

Lorna frowns. "Well, yeah, but see, this is why I have to ask you. I mean, I've read the books you've assigned in history, Dad, and a lot of the ones in the library, but they don't--they don't tell me about _you_ , okay? And you're where I came from. I wouldn't be here, if you hadn't survived."

Erik does not say _Emma would have found someone else to have you with_ , because that is not the point in question here and it would lead places he really doesn't want to go. Instead he says, "Lorna, you realize that one reason my name isn't on your birth certificate is so that--so that you could be free of all this, if you wanted to."

"Yeah," she says, voice rough, and Erik realizes she's on the verge of tears, though he can't fathom why. "Yeah, I know, Dad, and I appreciate that, but I _don't_ want to, I want to know. Whatever you can tell me. Whatever--I just--" She does start sobbing then, and Erik, completely at a loss, gets up from his chair immediately and rounds the desk, pulling her into his arms.

"Lorna," he says, "Lorna, sweetheart, what--"

She puts her head against his chest, and Erik automatically strokes her green hair slowly, trying to comfort a grief he doesn't understand. "It's not fair," she says at last, voice muffled by his shirt, "and I don't want--you can't tell me I'm not a part of it, Dad, that I'm not a part of _you_ \--"

Erik inhales sharply. "Lorna," he says, and puts his hands on her shoulders and pushes her back gently so that he can look down into her eyes. They're red now, and Erik fumbles for his handkerchief to dab at the tears that are still spilling down her cheeks. "Lorna," he says quietly, "I can't deny that, I would never want to. This was never about denying you, I just--" He shakes his head, impatient with all of his selves past and present. "I thought I would have been a terrible parent," he tells her; "I'm pretty terrible now, you realize. I wanted to spare you as much of the fallout from being connected with me as I could, for your sake. Really," he says, though of course his reasons sound thin out loud.

He has to admit that he can't blame Lorna for her feelings, though he can't regret agreeing to Emma's request sixteen years ago, and he can't quite think how to say, _I don't love your mother, except as a friend, and she knew that, so talk to her about this_ without sounding like a complete ass.

Lorna sniffs several more times, but takes a deep breath and lets it out shakily. "Okay," she says, and Erik hugs her again.

"You are a part of me, Lorna," he tells her, because it's the truth. "And if you do want to know about your--heritage from me, I'll tell you whatever I can. Just--can I ask you to give me a day or two? I promise," he says when she opens her mouth, "that I'll answer all your questions."

She frowns slightly, the expression the same as his own, but after a minute she nods and says, "Okay," then hugs him impulsively. "Thanks, Dad," she says, and turns on her heel and flees before he even has time to hug her back.

Erik stares after Lorna for a good minute or two, as if he had the power to see through walls. It bothers him sometimes, that his daughter is so American, but on the other hand he has no right to complain, given that he explicitly disavowed any desire--any capability--to be a father to her in any sense beyond the biological. That things turned out differently than he'd expected in that department too is also, in retrospect, not terribly surprising.

When he returns from his circuit of the grounds late that night, he's surprised to find that Charles isn't alone in the library; instead, Emma is with him, clearly speaking intensely, leaning over the table across from Charles. She looks up when Erik lets himself in through the glass doors and gives him a nod before returning her attention to Charles, who doesn't look happy.

"Please, Charles," Emma says, and turns to go. Erik, unthinkingly, raises a hand and catches at her elbow.

"Emma--"

She looks from his hand to his face and then rolls her eyes. "Goodnight, Magneto," she says firmly, and leaves, her heels making no noise on the carpet or the parquet.

Erik frowns after her, but he knows better than to try to force Emma Frost to do a single damn thing she doesn't want to do. Instead, he looks at Charles, who's pouring out two glasses of scotch. "Cheers," he says, raising the closer one in his right hand and offering the one in his left to Erik, who accepts it automatically and clinks glasses back.

Charles stocks good booze; the liquor is smooth and slightly smoky on his tongue, and Erik takes a drink that is probably larger than is strictly wise. "Lorna asked me about--about me," he says, looking down into the glass. "She said she wants to know whatever I'll tell her about--what happened, in the Shoah."

"What did you say?" Charles asks, when it's clear that Erik's not going to say anything else.

"I told her I'd tell her what I could," Erik says with a sigh; "I couldn't very well tell her no, could I?" He's aware that the words come out bitter, but it doesn't bother him. 

Charles' expression is unreadable. At length he takes another sip of his own drink and says, "She's been in here reading my copy of _Trial of the Major War Criminals before the IMT_ the past few weeks. Your daughter loves you very much, Erik."

Erik laughs. If it were up to Lorna, the entire library would be restocked entirely with earth science books, though hearing the formal name of the Nürnberg trials on Charles' lips makes him feel like he's missed a step going up the stairs. "Charles, don't project your own emotions on to Lorna, all right?"

"I am not projecting," Charles says; "I don't have to, to understand some of what she feels."

"Are you reading her mind?" Erik demands, looking up sharply.

But Charles' eyes are clear, and very blue. "No," he says, "I'm not, and you're still not listening. Lorna loves you more than she knows how to say, Erik, and she admires you, and she wants to feel like she means more to you than--than a piece of furniture, or any one of the other students. And the one thing she shares with you that they don't is your blood. And your abilities, to some extent," he adds thoughtfully.

Erik puts his glass down and looks at his hands: scarred, strong, capable of doing countless different things, but never, in the end, completely clean, and not for any of the reasons the Nazis believed, either. "You're trying to tell me that I can't spare her," he says, still looking at his hands. "I was an idiot to try."

"For God's sake, Erik, _no_ , I'm not," Charles snaps, and Erik looks back up at him: he's angry, or at least openly frustrated, which is actually somewhat uncommon. Charles fancies himself good-hearted. "This isn't about sparing Lorna anything--you're the one who always says that no one gets what they deserve, and that trying to spare anyone anything never leads anywhere good! This is about the fact that you're her _father_."

"I know that, Charles," Erik says flatly.

"Yes," Charles replies in the same tone of voice, "but you’re not thinking through what that means. You think," he says, as Erik downs half of his scotch in one go, "that just because she didn't grow up calling you her father, and you didn't do most of what you thought fathers do, that she doesn't love you. But it doesn't work like that. Children tend to love their parents no matter what."

"You are projecting," Erik says slowly, because he's finally figured out what the shadows in Charles' expression mean. 

"No," Charles says again, "and _before you say it_ , I'm not jealous, either. But I do envy her having a father who gives a damn. Even if he needs to learn how to communicate that fact."

"Charles--"

"Trust me, Erik, I know what I'm talking about." Charles knocks back his own scotch and puts the glass down on the table. "Believe me," he says quietly, looking around the room, "I know."

There's a short silence. Erik runs his hand over his eyes and says eventually, "Do you really mean to say you think I've been a better father than--than yours was?"

"My father died," Charles says calmly, "when I was five, and my mother remarried when I was six. You've done a much better job than she or my stepfather did, believe me."

Erik looks up at him, willing him to understand without words, but Charles has withdrawn his mind from where it normally lingers on the edge of Erik’s, and after a minute Erik rounds the table and drops into the chair next to Charles, taking his hands. "Show me?" he asks, because he's heard some of this before, in shreds and patches, but never all of it. And he's not fool enough to think that a memory holds the entire meaning of the experience, but it does hold some of the meaning.

Charles squeezes his hands tightly in his for a moment. "You don't have to," Erik says, but Charles shakes his head a little and, _All right_ , Erik hears, and then they're inside Charles' mind.

Erik has spent the odd idle hour trying to describe to himself what this experience is like--memories fade, after all, even the most vivid memory experienced again is not like the experience itself, but they're in Charles' childhood now, and it takes all of Erik's forty years of formidable self-control to retain any sense of himself in the face of it: children feel things so immediately, after all.

He's ten, meeting an eight-year old Raven in the kitchen for the first time in the middle of the night, calmly seeing straight through her counterfeiting his mother with the plain truth that his mother has never given a damn about hot cocoa, or about him. He's six, ringbearer at his mother's wedding, watching from the sidelines of the ceremony; his mother is beautiful, he thinks, but she only has eyes for his stepfather, and barely notices her son after the photographer has taken the wedding portrait. He's thirteen, working through high school physics problem sets in his bedroom while his parents have another of their endless rounds of alcohol-soaked garden parties below, trying to block out the drunken thoughts swirling up to him and the headache those thoughts are bringing on. He's sixteen, graduating high school with no one looking on and only the chauffeur to wish him congratulations, empty as the blue sky above. He's twenty, in Oxford, reading the telegram that's telling him that his mother has died in a car crash (he knows it was alcohol, though that's too many words for the message, FUNERAL THIS SATURDAY STOP FINAL STOP), the paper crumpling crisply in his fingers. He's twenty-one, in the hall of his Oxford flat, taking a telephone call from his stepfather's solicitor in London, informing him that his stepfather has died in unusual circumstances, because 'suicide' isn't a word people use in polite company: 1407 Greymalkin Lane and all the accumulated assets of the Xaviers, as well as his stepfather's considerable fortune, now belong to him. He doesn't go back to Salem Center until that day in 1962, the sun shining on his face and the familiar bite to the autumn air, New York state in October, and he can barely walk straight under the consciousness of how much he hates this place, and when Erik makes that crack about his upbringing, only the memory of what he's seen in the other man's mind keeps him from punching Erik in the face.

Erik blinks, coming back to himself between one breath and the next. He remembers, the first time he'd seen this ridiculous mansion, teasing Charles about the hardship incumbent in growing up in it, but he sees now that he wasn't entirely wrong. Neglect takes its own toll.

"You see," Charles says hoarsely, looking at the table, the bookshelves, anywhere but at Erik, and Erik frees one of his hands to put a hand to Charles' face, making him look at him.

"I do see," he says, with the calm he's learned to wield in these situations. "You should have punched me." Charles' lips quirk, altering the track of the tear down his cheek so that Erik is able to brush it away.

"Well, between punching you and fucking you, I think I made the right choice," he says, the humor weak but real, but then he sighs. "I wonder," he tells Erik quietly, "what they would have said, what I would have said to them, about--all this. I don't really think it would have made them pay attention, at least not beyond hating me, but I'll never know. She died too young." He sounds just as bitter as Erik had, and rightfully so. Old pain, scarred over, but never able to be healed.

"It wasn't anything you did, or didn't do," Erik says, because even from a child's perspective, that much was obvious. As for Charles' question, it's something he's never been able to bring himself to ask. He thinks of Charles' father, of his own parents, and knows that Charles is one of a kind.

Charles closes his eyes when Erik kisses him, but neither of them make a move to take it further. Eventually Charles says against Erik's lips, "I loved her anyway, you realize."

"Yes," Erik says, and then at last he understands what Charles, in his meandering fashion, has been trying to say. "You think--you think that's how it is with Lorna?" he asks, sitting back, but Charles tightens his grip on his hand, and Erik doesn't move very far.

"Yes," he says, "I know that's how it is with Lorna, except you don't disregard her, Erik, and you've never done anything that hasn't made her love you more." Erik shakes his head, wordless, and Charles smiles fondly, relaxing his grip to run a hand through Erik's hair. "It's not just me, you know," he says. "All the students think you're the coolest teacher at the school, all of the teachers admire you, hell, even Emma likes you, and we both know that's quite a compliment. You're as much the leader of this school as I am, if not more so."

"Was she asking you to tell me this, before?" Erik asks shrewdly, because it sounds a lot like several things Emma has said before that he never could quite grasp, no matter how much he'd listened. He's still not quite sure that he believes Charles' words, but it makes sense, and it's not an unverifiable hypothesis.

Charles rolls his eyes. He and Emma have really only started to get along in the past few years, more through time wearing down the edges of their dislike than through any dramatic revelations. "Yes, and for the record, I'm so thrilled to be playing telephone between the two of you."

"You were the one who said Lorna would be a good idea," Erik reminds him. "And I seem to remember you getting several papers out of her genetic material."

Charles at least looks a little embarrassed. Emma had given her consent, of course; given that one of her stated reasons for asking Erik in the first place had been her curiosity about combining their powers, she'd been just as interested as Charles in learning what he'd found out. If Erik had had any legal right to make his opinion about the whole thing known, he would have forbidden it absolutely, but he didn't and it's long done. He can at least admit, intellectually, that knowing more about their own kind is useful, even necessary.

He just wishes it weren't Lorna, weren't his _daughter_ , but there it is.

The next morning, Erik and Lorna head down to the lake after breakfast. Along the way, Erik gathers his nerve and starts to talk.


	3. 1983

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles and Erik are determined to stop Senator Kelly's Mutant Registration Act, no matter what. Along the way, they dredge up old memories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to cygnaut for looking this over.

Even with the fortune Charles has spent on the school's facilities and equipment, he still has fortunes more, particularly since he's developed a reputation, among the more discreet echelons of Wall Street, as an investor with razor-sharp instincts. In the United States, when one has a lot of money one uses it to buy influence with political power, and Charles Francis Xavier, the last of the Westchester Xaviers, is no exception to that rule.

He's been a low-key presence in Albany, Manhattan and the District of Columbia for twenty years; at this point Charles probably knows all three places better than Erik does, given that he rarely leaves the mansion for anywhere else. But Senator Robert Kelly and the proposed Mutant Registration Act prove to be a formidable obstacle, even for Charles' wealth and influence.

He, Jean, and Beast have been called to testify to the Congressional committees in question twice already this year, but according to Charles it's this third round that will prove decisive. It's courageous, what they're doing, and Erik knows it, because as much as he'd willingly throw what he is in the world's face--has, by living unashamed, and does, by using his powers in defense of his brethren--it's not the same for Charles, who was somehow able to hide what he was for thirty years, or for Jean, who's never seriously considered that option, or for Beast, who spent the first thirty years of his life wishing for a different body entirely.

But they're the ones with Ph.D.s and M.S.s and M.D.s, and the initials after your name matter to the U.S. Congress, in places where people get political. They're proof that mutants can coexist with humans, and as far as Erik can tell, none of the three of them harbor any doubt about what they're about to do, the morning they leave for Washington.

"Erik," Charles says into his ear, speaking out loud rather than into his mind, the reason for which becomes clear when Erik sits up, blinking sleep away, and the half-memories of his nightmares wash back over him, like the wave that surprises you as the tide's pulling out. Not that the nightmares are any different from those he's been having over the past six months or so. He'd dreamed about the camps for years, after the end of the war; that's nothing new. What's new is seeing his fellow mutants--students, friends, Mystique, Lorna, _Charles_ , people that he loves--in the camps in his dreams, and it's frankly terrifying.

He'd put fear aside, years ago, but this is what caring about people does to you; it's come back, all the worse because the MRA isn't a threat that Erik can de- or re- or alternately magnetize out of existence. He's watching it happen again like he didn't, couldn't do the first time, because he was born into the midst of it and he'd gotten the full picture as much from books as he had from the stories of older survivors, but he's fifty-one years old and reading the news reports and being, somehow, the only one who apparently understands what's going on, how quickly things can change, is like eating ground glass three meals a day.

"I have to leave," Charles says from next to the bed, looking at Erik with frank concern.

"All right," Erik says automatically, but then he makes a decision to be selfish and swings his legs out of bed and immediately goes to a crouch beside Charles' chair, turning his face into Charles' stomach. "Don't," he says. _Just--five minutes, Charles, please._

Charles sucks in a breath, and Erik can feel the muscles of his diaphragm moving against his nose, because Charles has developed a frankly mind-blowing set of torso and upper body muscles in the years since the beach. It's comforting in a mindless way, the feel of Charles' breathing and the fabric of his shirt mingled with the scent of his body and the soap of his clothes, and Charles brings his hand up to rest at the base of Erik's skull, fingertips stroking his scalp lightly. _All right_ , he says, his affection and concern wrapping around and suffusing Erik.

They don't need to discuss that with Charles, Beast, and Jean gone, it'll be on Erik to keep the school together, because Emma and Storm--and, all right, Cyclops too--are perfectly capable but it's Erik who's got the relevant experience here, and everyone knows it and is looking to him. And if to be what they need Erik needs five minutes to lose it again, with no one but Charles to see and no one at all to judge, he can have that five minutes.

Charles doesn't project comfort or reassurance to Erik, mostly because they both know he wouldn't take it; what calms Erik best is determination, and resolve, and Charles gives him both, along with his love and worry. Eventually--it's been more than five minutes, Erik has an excellent sense of time, but so does Charles for that matter--Charles moves his hand to the nape of Erik's neck.

 _I do need to go_ , he says, speaking mind-to-mind to give Erik the full FM band of his emotions.

Erik likes Charles’ voice, and Charles knows that sometimes there’s a difference between things you say and things you think. "Tell me you'll stop this somehow," he says, not moving.

 _I won't stop it_ , Charles tells him, _we will. One way or another, Erik, I swear to you._

"All right," Erik says at last, and he takes a deep breath and straightens to pull Charles into a fierce kiss. Charles returns it just as forcefully, fisting his half-gloved hands against Erik's bare shoulders, and when they break apart Erik says directly, "I love you."

Charles grins at him, an unexpected echo of that unbridled enthusiasm that had so entranced Erik two decades ago. "I know," he says. "I love you, too. Take care of our family, all right?"

Normally such sentimental verbiage would merit Erik rolling his eyes at the least, but today's not a normal day. "I will," he says, serious, and they kiss again for good measure before Charles gives him one last look, folio volumes in his blue eyes, and then he's out the door of their bedroom and into the hallway and gone, though the sense of his presence via their mental link doesn't fade yet. Erik knows from long experience that D.C. is far enough away that the link will be attenuated there, another reason he hates the capital.

Neither of them are willing to address the possibility that it's already too late.

* * * * *

Charles' parting words are of course easier agreed to than enacted, but Erik has had a lot of practice at accomplishing the impossible. He's shrugging into a shirt when he hears the roar of Beast engaging the jet's afterburners, and he's just in time to look out the bedroom window and see its black V profile streaking away south. In the back of his mind, he can feel Charles, a bright star of determination.

Erik makes his way determinedly to the kitchen, which these days is used only by the adults in the main building; the students' meals are prepared in the main kitchen in the basement. Erik pours himself a cup of coffee and takes a seat on one of the stools around the island, not willing to go out to the dining room before he's awake enough to keep up a reassuring front.

Predictably, Logan has the unfortunate timing to walk in before he's half-finished the coffee. "You look like hell," Wolverine tells him bluntly, and Erik raises an eyebrow.

There are a variety of responses he could make; eventually he settles for, "Is it that obvious?"

Wolverine shrugs, walking past Erik to get his own coffee. "If I weren't a hundred, you mean?" he asks, taking a mug out of the cabinet. "I don't know."

Charles would be making a comment about emotional intelligence right now, or at least thinking it very loudly. Erik takes another drink of coffee. "I think I have cause," he says at last. "But thanks for the heads-up."

"Magneto--" Wolverine shuts the refrigerator door behind him and turns to face Erik. "You're not going to let this Act go through, are you?"

"No, I'm not," Erik says, meeting his eyes, aware that his smile is more shark-like than human, showing all his teeth. "Can I count of you, if I need you?"

Wolverine gives him a disgusted look. "You're asking me that now? Fuck you, bub.”

Erik holds up a hand. "Sorry," he says, and means it. "You're right."

"Nice to hear you say it," Wolverine says, and were they different men Erik would clap him on the shoulder. But they are who they are, and instead he just gives Logan a nod before he heads out the door, his empty metal mug floating into the sink behind him.

 

Rather than awkwardly convert rooms in the main building, when they'd installed the big-screen TV and cable hookup last year they'd just remodeled one of the new underground rooms into a TV room deluxe. One of the TV's cable channels is C-SPAN, and that afternoon finds most of the school perched on the sofas, couches and cushions around it, watching the hearings in Washington live.

Erik is there too, against his own personal inclination, wearing his best poker face. It's not difficult to project his pride as he watches Dr. Jean Grey, Ph.D., be sworn onto the record--her degree is less than two months old--but hiding his very real apprehension at the tenor of the questions she fields is more difficult. His hatred for Senator Robert Kelly, he doesn't try to disguise.

There'd been some talk of using these hearings as a civics lesson--Storm teaches politics these days, and is brilliant at it--but Erik is pretty sure that's been thrown over; no one at the Xavier Institute has the heart for classes today.

Jean's testimony takes a while; Charles isn't even on the schedule, and they clearly won't be calling Hank today. Erik is aware that Lorna, Kitty, and Jubilee have been watching from one of the rear sofas; at this point he can identify most of the school by their unique somatic trace metal signature. But he's frankly still somewhat surprised when Lorna gets up and sits down beside him, putting her head on his shoulder. "Dad, they're not going to--"

Erik may be, in the final analysis, an indifferent parent at best, but he knows enough to put one arm around his daughter immediately, hugging her close. He's unable to keep from throwing a glance at Kitty, wondering again what if anything she'd heard from her grandfather. Part of the reason Lorna is so openly scared is because she'd asked him about the Shoah, about his past, and he'd told her the truth.

On the screen, Congressman Armando Muñoz has just wrapped up his questions, and Jean takes a sip of water while she waits for the next representative to speak. "No," Erik tells Lorna, pitching his voice to carry, aware that the entire room is listening. He can feel Cyclops' stare attempting to drill holes in the back of his head. "They're not going to, because we won't let them."

Lorna isn't a child anymore, hasn't been for years, but he can feel her making the decision to believe him, to let that belief exorcise her very adult doubts, as though she were much younger. "Okay," she says, and Erik turns his head slightly to press a kiss to her green hair, silently wishing he were a telepath so that he could compel Cyclops not to bother them now even as he curses the world, where hatred and power will put the innocently different at such abominable risk. He'd thought he'd be able to keep her safe, to keep them all safe; a necessary delusion, perhaps, but one that he'll do whatever he must to preserve, in this one instance.

 

Cyclops waits until after dinner to corner him, in the library of all places, where Erik is staring at a chess problem futilely, whiskey on the rocks untouched at his elbow.

"You can't be thinking of doing this," Cyclops says as soon as the door's shut behind him.

Erik looks up at him. "Doing what?" he asks.

"Damn it, Magneto!" Cyclops all but shouts, tension clear in every line of his body. "Don't be coy! I don't know what exactly you're planning, but it doesn't take an oracle to know that you're going to do _something_. Let me guess," he says, staring at Erik, who stares straight back, "you're going to murder Kelly."

Erik feels his lips twitch, though not from humor. "Assassinate, technically, but yes, if this bill passes the committee." It will.

Cyclops stares at him, aghast. "You can't," he says, and Erik frowns.

"I can and I will," he says, and then he does take a drink of his whiskey.

"On your own?" There's a dangerous low note in Cyclops' voice, which Erik registers but doesn't find intimidating.

"I think not," he replies, and cuts Cyclops off before he can say anything else. "Don't worry, Scott, no one's going to make you do anything against your _conscience_." Yes, that's definitely a sneer.

"Don't take that tone with me, Magneto," Cyclops snaps, "just because I scruple at _murder_. I fought with you against Stryker, or have you forgotten that in the aftermath of _going crazy_?"

Erik stares at him. Scott's obviously expecting it to be a painful blow, which in the end says more about Scott's views than it does about Erik's. For his part, Erik is reasonably sure that he could demolish Cyclops with a dozen or so considered words even now, but so few people seem to realize that destruction has never been his goal, even if it's his preferred method. If he's been harsh or uncompromising--and he has--it's because he'd rather their students learn their weak spots, and how to protect them, in the relative safety of the school before they're thrown to the jaws of the world.

It's not surprising that Cyclops has refused to learn that; it shouldn't feel like a disappointment. "Cyclops, if you think we can afford to let that bill get to the floor," he says at last, "or that there's any difference between killing Kelly or taking out Stryker, then you're as hypocritical as you are ignorant. Violence is violence." He takes advantage of Cyclops' stunned expression to throw back another drink of his liquor.

"Stryker attacked _us_ ," Cyclops disagrees; "we met violence with violence because we had no choice. Killing Kelly won't solve anything."

"That depends how you define the problem," Erik tells him. "For our present purposes, his death will serve admirably."

"And you have the right to decide that?" Cyclops asks through clenched teeth.

"This has nothing to do with rights," Erik says, tired all over again, "except inasmuch as we have no guarantees of ours under current law. It's just what has to be done, for all of us, especially if you want your precious future to have any chance at all." It took Charles decades to understand this point, that all the fraught ethical crap is functionally irrelevant, boondoggles after the fact, let alone accept it.

Especially right now, he really misses Charles.

"You only say that because violence is all you've ever known,” Cyclops says, contempt suffusing his words.

Erik just barely manages to shut his mouth on words that would cause an irreparable breach, at best, or start an argument that would leave one of them--Scott--dead at worst. Instead he takes an unwontedly charitable interpretation of Scott's words and says nastily, "Whatever helps you sleep at night, Cyclops; I'm not going to argue your personal prevarications. But don't you think it's odd, how events keep factoring down to my denominator?"

Cyclops stares at him. Absent the more obvious physical indicators, the glasses make it hard for Erik to read his demeanor with certainty, even after a decade and more. "No I don't, actually, Magneto," Cyclops tells him at last, sounding years older than he is. "I've never deluded myself that we're any better than baseline humans, beyond genetics. Excuse me."

He leaves, not even giving Erik time to acknowledge the fact that he'd finally managed to make a relevant point.

Sweeping away the pieces off the chessboard physically is the action of a younger, more frustrated man; restoring the pieces to their positions without lifting a finger is somewhat more mature. Erik drains his whiskey and retreats from the room before anyone else can attempt to sharpen their moral qualms on him.

* * * * *

When Charles calls him from his hotel late on the third evening of his trip, Erik knows before he picks up the phone that the news isn't good.

"The majority leader has scheduled a vote on Kelly's bill for next Tuesday," Charles tells him without preamble when he picks up the phone. His voice is exhausted and scratchy, and Erik has a good idea of just how much effort Charles has put into this; he's the strongest person Erik knows.

Erik listens to the faint clicking of the scrambler in the background for a few seconds before he realizes that Charles wants him to say something. "Will it pass?" he asks, and he can hear Charles sigh.

"It will be close in the Senate," he says, "but as things stand in the House, it won't even be difficult. And of course the President will sign it if it gets to his desk."

"How did this happen?" Erik asks, putting his feet up on the desk and staring out the window. He's sitting in darkness in their joint office, because he's alone and he can; he can just make out the old moon in the new moon's arms high in the sky through the window.

None of these thoughts are providing much distraction from the bleak rage churning within him.

"Someone has pumped a lot of money into this," Charles says flatly. "I'm going to find out who, of course, but in the meantime…" He sucks in an audible breath. "I think you should do something about this," he says, and four states away, Erik takes his feet off the desk and sits up straight.

"If I do," he says carefully, "will that put an end to it?” He doesn't stop to marvel at the fact that Charles Xavier is asking him to kill a United States Senator; Charles has no qualms about this sort of thing in the end. But the admission that Charles' abilities are inadequate--that's not new, but it's quite unusual.

"For this session, at least," Charles confirms. "The MRA is Kelly's pet project; no one else likes it enough to pick up the banner after him, at least not without field-testing the rhetoric in the election next fall. But," he says pointedly, "that only holds true if he meets with an _accident_."

As opposed to something more deliberate. It grates on Erik's nerves, but it's not the first time they've concealed their involvement in certain notable incidents. "Can't you just influence Kelly _directly_?" he asks, careful not to be too explicit, even on an ostensibly secure line. The last thing they need is this conversation going any further.

"Of course I could," Charles snaps. Erik doesn’t take it personally. “But it wouldn't take very well; dropping the bill is far too antithetical to his core beliefs. He'd have a cognitive break eventually even if he did believe what I put in there, and that's not even considering the people around him, who will know it's unlike him and say as much."

Another uncommon admission. Erik winds the phone cord around one hand idly. By rights he ought to put Charles on speaker and pull Emma and Storm and Logan in here, get their opinions. But he already knows what they'd say, for the most part, and in the end, it's still his and Charles' decision. The others will be free to refuse to participate, of course; they won't.

It's rather ironic that now that it's come to this point it's Erik who's taking it calmly, perhaps because he retains so much less faith in the human race than Charles does. And it's not like he was calm about it earlier this year, when Charles had in fact made him an explicit promise to do everything within his power to fight Kelly and his legislation.

It occurs to Erik that, absent an attempt at mind-wiping Kelly, he could argue that Charles is breaking that promise. But he prefers a more permanent solution himself, and if Charles, who knows the man and his milieu much better than Erik cares to, thinks this is the best solution, well, then perhaps it's just best to think of Erik and the X-Men as part of Charles' arsenal in this.

"All right," he says, still twirling the phone cord in one hand. "Tuesday, you said?"

 

He hears Charles let out a breath at the other end. He's troubled, but they're too far away for Charles to link their minds, or to feel each other's presence in their heads, and Erik can admit that it's probably for the better at the moment. There will be time to nurse their old, reopened wounds later. Right now, he has a Senator to execute.

"Yes," Charles says heavily. "May I ask what you're going to do?"

"Not on an open line." Erik has managed to tangle the phone cord around his forearm to an impressive degree, he realizes, holding his arm up in front of him and contemplating the mess. "Besides, I'm not sure yet."

"All right," Charles replies. "Then I'll see you when I get home."

"Yes," Erik replies, and then on impulse, before Charles can hang up, he adds, "I love you."

He can hear Charles hesitate. It's not the sort of thing they usually trust to telephones; Erik rarely even says it directly. But-- "I love you too, Erik," Charles tells him quietly, and then there's the click of the receiver being put down and the line being closed.

Erik unplugs the cord from the receiver in his hand and uses his power to disentangle the cord from his arm, manipulating the wires inside the plastic sheathing. When he's done the cord plugs back in to the receiver and he places the receiver in the pickup, not before he hears the annoying blaring noise of a telephone off the hook. When he's done the room is quiet. Erik gets up from his desk and goes to find the others; they have work to do.

* * * * *

Erik isn't a telepath, but somatic trace metals--and blood--speak as eloquently to him as the glow of a human consciousness does to a psionic; he stretches out his senses, and realizes that fortuitously, most of the people he wants to speak to have already congregated in the kitchen. For those who were here at the beginning, or from just after, twenty years of expansion haven't changed the fact that the kitchen still feels the most natural place to gather when you want the reassurance of company.

There are still a few people absent, though, so next, Erik focuses his thoughts rather than his abilities.

_Emma?_

They aren't linked the way that he and Charles are, thankfully, but she's in the main building, extremely powerful in her own right, and being Lorna's parents has granted them a certain mutual sensitivity.

 _I take it we're finally taking the gloves off with Kelly_ , she says in his head a minute later. Her presence is much more…limited than Charles'; he can only catch a hint of frustration underneath the wry tenor of the question.

 _Yes_ , Erik confirms. _Can you ping Logan? He's on the roof. Back kitchen, ten minutes._

 _Sure_ , she says, and she's gone.

Storm's already sitting at the kitchen table when Erik gets there, a steaming mug of the red tea she favors untouched in front of her. They exchange nods as Erik goes to pour himself a mug of coffee; her lips quirk when he taps the cup, giving her a significant glance. That had been an old training exercise; when he raises the mug to his lips, the coffee is the perfect temperature, hot but not painful.

Emma appears and takes a seat on the bench next to Storm, leaving Erik to sit, not without reservations, in the chair at its head. When he comes in, smelling of the Havana cigars he somehow sources in defiance of the embargo, Logan leans against the counter with arms crossed, wearing his default glower.

"We're going to kill Kelly before the Registration Act goes to the floor on Tuesday," Erik says without preamble when Logan's transferred the glower to him. "I want your participation or your material assistance or both. Are you in or out?"

He already has Logan's answer, of course, so he looks around the table, meeting everyone's eyes in turn. No one looks away.

"All right then," Erik continues. "The next question is how. Charles wants us to make this look accidental."

They had no qualms before, but that gets a reaction, from Emma's sharply raised eyebrow to Logan's bark of sardonic laughter and Storm's bitten-off oath.

"The Professor agreed to this?" she asks, fixing her silver stare on Erik. It's less intimidating in light of the fact that he can remember her as a girl of eight who made it rain when she cried, but he takes it in the spirit in which it was meant.

"Yes," he says shortly, "he did, and you can discuss his reasoning with him if you like when he gets back. In the meantime, my original question still stands."

"Well," Emma says, "the answer to that depends on whether you want anyone else in on this."

"Nightcrawler," Wolverine suggests, and Erik has to admit that he has the skills of a born thespian: Storm, in her inimitable way, takes the bait.

"Kurt would never agree to this," she says to Logan, "and you know it." 

Wolverine shrugs at her, making a show of checking his pockets before he produces a half-finished cigar, which he clamps firmly in his teeth before he replies. "I know that, sweetheart," he tells her; "but do you?"

Storm has iron control, on top of being the calmest person Erik knows, and they're all used to Logan by now; she raises a quelling eyebrow at him, but doesn't say anything else. "What about Shadowcat?" Wolverine asks, lighting the cigar. He leans across the sink behind him to crack open the window, and Storm's eyes flash for a moment; the cigar smoke meekly streams straight outside.

He's trying to bait a past master; it's admirable, if futile. "Kitty's a child," Erik says mildly. "More to the point, she's nowhere near well trained enough for something like this."

Emma raises an eyebrow, but she doesn't accuse him of coddling Shadowcat for the moment; Erik is quite confident she'll save it for later, probably when they're arguing about Lorna. "What about Cyclops?" she asks, and Wolverine barks a laugh.

"Are you fucking serious?" he asks her. "He barely has the balls to punch people."

"Well he's not going to grow a pair sitting here in Westchester," Emma snaps, and Erik cuts off Logan's indrawn breath before they can spend an even longer time debating the size of Scott Summers' nuts.

"Cyclops has already refused," he tells them. "But I want Jean."

He meets Emma's gaze as he says it, and after a long moment her narrowed eyes widen back to their usual frozen green, and she nods. He doesn't have to tell her what he's trying to do. And, being Emma Frost, she approves of it.

"They get back tomorrow," Storm reminds them.

"Which gives us a little less than three days to kill this fucker," Wolverine adds.

"Yes," Erik says, and produces the sheet of printer paper he'd just torn off the facsimile. "This is Kelly's schedule for the next week. Let's make this work."

* * * * *

Martha's Vineyard is well within Charles' mental range, and he's aware, in the back of his mind, of Erik's grim concentration all the way through, his distant disgust that Kelly's made it so damn easy, his equally distant satisfaction when it's done and the Senator's private plane is a burning scrum on the cold swells of the North Atlantic. _Ask for no Orphean lute/To pluck life back_ , Charles thinks to himself, and he doesn't, and he won't. Not in this case, though in the abstract, under certain conditions, the idea is certainly tempting. 

There had been no question of sleeping while he was waiting for the team's errand of murder--he can't think of it as anything but that, but he can't, couldn't, find any other way to balance the equations of the situation, to weigh the politics against the possible, and no matter what he calls it he knows that it was necessary--to finish, and so when he feels Erik and the jet about ten minutes out he's in the gym, alone under the spotlights, the clock on the wall reading 01:32.

Charles finishes the set of reps, barely aware of what his body is doing while he reaches out with his mind to a very familiar psyche. _Scott? They'll be home soon._

 _Thanks, Professor_ , Scott thinks, almost as natural in this mode of communication as Erik, and by the time Charles has racked the weights and shut off the gym lights and wheeled out to the tarmac Scott is already there, standing in the mouth of the tunnel with his arms crossed tightly over his chest. He gives Charles a nod, but doesn't comment on his rare state of underdress in gym pants and maroon T-shirt with the school emblem X'd over his heart.

Yes, Charles is making several symbolic gestures tonight, simultaneously. He and Scott wait in silence for the people they love best to return to them, and soon enough there's the roar overhead of the afterburners throttling down to a dull rumble and then shutting off completely as the jet touches down, the whoosh of the landing platform hydraulics engaging and retracting the entire assembly below the tennis courts.

The suits are no longer the navy and eye-blistering yellow of Hank's original, vintage 1962 designs; instead they're mostly a subdued dark grey, with a few yellow accents, a compromise between Hank's apparent fondness for citrine and Erik's maniacal insistence on camouflage and survivability. After twenty years and more, Charles knows well how to give everyone an unobtrusive once-over, checking for visible damage even as he hears Erik in his head saying, _It was fine, no one's injured_.

Unconsciously--the X-Men are well-trained--they exit the hangar in a rough bent diamond formation, Erik on point followed by Ororo and Jean flanking him, with Logan bringing up the rear. All four of them slow to a halt when they see Charles and Scott waiting for them, and if Jean's eyes flick to Scott first, soon enough they're all looking at Charles, who forces himself to take a breath, and speaks.

"Well done, everyone," he says quietly, making sure to meet each of their eyes in turn. "Thank you."

Erik reaches out and hands Charles a folded piece of paper, intensely incongruous in the context of the jet, the suits, the mission. Charles accepts it without any visible hesitation; he's not the only one making grand gestures. "What's this?" he asks out loud, because there's a script here, and he's got marks to hit.

"The list of people whose memories we need you to alter, to make this undetectable," Erik replies. "Five, in total."

"All right," Charles says, meeting his eyes for a second before looking out towards the others. He's one of them, in the end. "I'll do it immediately."

He doesn't need telepathy to feel the intense disapproval radiating off of Scott, but the moment stretches until Jean breaks formation and maneuvers between Charles and Erik to throw her arms around him, bringing Scott's mouth down to hers with one hand.

"Don't mention it," Logan grunts, shifting his gaze back to Charles, who nods at him again before he brushes past his wheelchair, presumably heading for his room and eventually sleep.

Ororo looks at him next, her gaze frankly measuring. Charles hopes he hasn't lost her respect, but he's learned by now not to compound his error by actively diving into her head to find out. "I hope," she tells him, "that we never find such actions necessary again."

Charles' lips twist bitterly. "So do I, Ororo," he replies, and she nods to him.

"Then goodnight, Professor."

Charles turns towards Scott and Jean, who's looking at him with the same sort of re-evaluating gaze as Storm. He can't blame her, precisely; killing Kelly was the last thing he wanted to do, and it goes against everything he wants to believe about mutants, about humans, about the future.

It took Charles decades, to understand that just because he wasn't actively using his powers to their full extent--and even now, probably only Erik and Raven and Jean understand what that hackneyed phrase, "full extent," means in his case--didn't mean that he'd actually done anything admirable, worth emulating. It took more than that, to live ethically, to come within shouting distance of the self-image he'd always maintained, and if he's honest with himself he can admit that he never gets closer than shouting distance, that too many bad habits are too ingrained, and the idea that in a society of telepaths he'd be perfectly moral is a pretty excuse but still an excuse in the final analysis.

Thinking about this now, however, is a distraction from the question at hand, and Charles meets Jean's fiery gaze directly, bearing up under her scrutiny. She has the right, if anyone does, as he'd tried to indicate again tonight, by coming here; she's an adult in the School now, no longer a child or in that awkward liminal state between adolescence and full acceptance. Everyone here tonight has the rights and privileges to go with the responsibilities, and one of those responsibilities is making one's own decisions, just as one of those rights is questioning Charles'.

After a long moment, Jean nods slowly, the sense of her light mental pressure fading. "We have to make this worth something, Professor," she says.

"We will," Erik promises from behind Charles, who takes a breath and finishes, "First thing tomorrow morning. You should get some sleep."

Scott cracks a grin that's not entirely humorous. "Same to you, Professor." He doesn't say anything to Erik, but Jean meets his eyes for a long moment.

"Phoenix," he says, inclining his head, and she nods.

"Goodnight, Magneto."

They head down the corridor arm in arm, leaving Charles and Erik alone, looking after them rather than at each other. There's the ponderous thunk of the hangar lights being shut off, and then Charles looks up, meeting Erik's gaze from the side.

"Come with me?" he asks lightly, holding up the paper.

"Of course," Erik says, and paces along with Charles' wheels as they make their way though the subterranean tunnels that riddle the grounds, out to Cerebro.

These days it's a far cry from the frankly crude device Charles first strapped onto his head all those years ago, and Erik waits at the end of the gangway, leaning against the door with his hands clasped in front of him while Charles wheels out to the platform at the end and places the headpiece over his skull.

Using Cerebro with Erik in the same room has always been intense, right from the beginning, even more intense than the rush of using the thing by itself, and that intensity has only strengthened as time has gone on, much like the strength of the mental link that binds them together. Tonight Charles is uncomfortably, hyperaware of the melange of thoughts and emotions roiling through Erik, as though he were under a microscope on a lab bench, and Charles forces his mind away, out to the wider world. It's always more of a challenge to find a baseline human than it is to find a mutant using Cerebro, but all the names on the list are well within his range, and it's the work of only a few minutes to modify their memories, clipping the pieces of information it would be inconvenient for them to know.

Where the knowledge goes after Charles edits it out, he doesn't know; it's a romantic question in some sense, as well as scientific, but science can't follow him here, and he's not enough of a neuroscientist to speculate reasonably.

More distraction. Charles reels his awareness back in and lifts the headpiece off, setting it back in its cradle before powering down the entire machine. Only then does he turn back towards Erik.

"It's finished," he says, crumpling the piece of paper in his fingers.

"Good," Erik says, but there's no particular triumph in his tone, just exhaustion and relief. Charles can feel his satisfaction, but it's positively bloodless compared to the memories of killing people that he treasured when they first met, or to the gout of emotions that ran through him when he put the coin through Shaw's skull, with Charles' awareness still inside it.

Or at least, that's what Charles knows from Erik's memories. At the time, thanks to the helmet, he couldn't have said what Erik was thinking or feeling to save his life.

Erik's lips quirk when Charles gets closer: as is not uncommon, their thoughts have been running on parallel tracks, and Charles reflects a shard of memory over the link.

> "You should have stopped," Erik says, dumbfounded. "How can you not have--I was certain that you had stopped." Unspoken, inside his own skull under the helmet, is the knowledge that hoping that Charles would hate him had been an anchor, a necessary lie, and without that rock to clutch he's at sea, the painful certainties of the months since the beach swept away beneath his feet.
> 
> Charles stares at him for a long moment, searching the slits in the helmet for some hint of his expression presumably, and then laughs bitterly. It doesn't suit him at all, any more than the harsh new lines in his face do. "Well," he says, and the knowing pain in his voice rakes at Erik like salt in a wound, "I'm disproved again. If you didn't come back for me, Erik, then why are you here?"
> 
> "I did come back for you," Erik tells him quietly, "you and everyone else here, Charles. I can't let you--the future's too important to squander fighting amongst ourselves, and I can't let you delude our brightest hopes into thinking that there aren't monsters in the world. There are," he says after a moment. "It takes one to know one, after all."
> 
> Charles turns his head away, closes his eyes, obscuring his expression. "Thank you for that vote of confidence, Erik," he says, acid, but less forcefully than before.
> 
> Erik stares at him, knowing that he should take off the helmet, that the burden of proof (among so many others) is on him here, wishing he could bring himself to cross to Charles--to Charles' wheelchair, damn it--and fold him into his arms, swear to protect him from anything and everything the world would throw at him.
> 
> Except that Charles would never accept that protection, and even if he did, how could Erik protect Charles from himself? He and Raven are the only ones who have ever hurt Charles, and none of them delude themselves into thinking that what Raven did to Charles outweighs Erik's actions, however unintentional one of them was.
> 
> So he stays where he is, rooted to the spot as though the floor were magnetized and there was iron in his feet.
> 
> Eventually, Charles looks back at him, the winter sunlight casting stark shadows across his face from the new angle. Even if, as is only reasonable, Charles is about to throw him out, this entire errand of idiocy was worth it, to see him in person--paralyzed, damaged, beautiful, alive—again.
> 
> "How can I trust you?" Charles asks, which is not the question Erik had been expecting, but something in his tone frees Erik to steel himself to make at least one correct move.
> 
> "I don't think you can," he answers, grim; "you certainly shouldn't." He reaches up and removes the helmet for the first time in a very long while, and Charles takes a deep breath, like a drowning man who's just broken the surface against all hope.
> 
> He closes his eyes, putting his head down, but not before Erik catches a glimpse of his stricken expression. He doesn't understand--he was prepared for the sense of Charles rifling through his memories, or just of him lingering fondly in Erik's mind, not the absence of any such feeling--but he doesn't know what to do, either, so he keeps standing there.
> 
> "You don't understand what it feels like, do you?"
> 
> "Understand what what feels like?"
> 
> "That damnable helmet," Charles says, voice hardening with sudden revulsion, looking back up at Erik. His eyes are wet, and Erik is even more baffled than before. "It feels like you've died, Erik. Not--not unconsciousness, or sleep, or even a coma, there's just nothing, and--" He cuts himself off, looking away.
> 
> Erik can fill in the blanks easily enough; love scorned isn't a particularly inventive puzzlemaker. "You're right," he says, "I didn't know." It's all the apology he can offer, which is telling.
> 
> If he hadn't left--if he hadn't been so focused on intimidating Moira--if, if, if. None of it matters; what's done is done, and they all have to live with it. If Erik will be doing that alone, well, he knows who to blame.
> 
> There's another sharp intake of breath, and he looks at Charles to see his expression shift into a very familiar irritation, the look he gets when someone isn't catching on to what Charles feels is patently obvious. "Don't be an idiot," he says, and then without warning or permission he gives Erik the full panorama of his mind, emotions and feelings and memories blasting into him like a firehose.
> 
> For a moment, Erik nearly loses his grip on himself, so overwhelming is the welter of thoughts, an entire mindscape distilled and pouring into him, but somehow just the knowledge that Charles won't let him lose himself, will dive unerring into the mental ocean between them and drag him back to shore, just like when they first met, is enough to keep him anchored.
> 
> Anchored, and weak with relief, with the knowledge that he's been given an incredible gift undeserving, all over again. Because of all the emotions pulsing through Charles, around him, all the anger and pain and fear and disgust, the strongest by far, like a sun surrounded by candles, is Charles' love and relief, tempered by a giddy joy, the knowledge that nothing can stop them now that Erik's come back and they're together, just as they should be.
> 
> "It won't be that easy," Erik warns, so thoroughly inundated with Charles' perceptions that his voice feels strange in his throat, sounds suspicious in his ears.
> 
> The maelstrom calms enough that he can tell their thoughts apart more easily, can feel Charles sense and agree with his intention of beginning again as he means to go on, in total honesty.
> 
> "I know," Charles says, taking him seriously. _But not everything worth doing is easy._ He takes a breath, lets it out. _I'm willing to try if you are, Erik._ "I never wanted--I never wanted any of this."
> 
> _Neither did I,_ Erik thinks, knows Charles hears him. Aloud, he says, "I meant what I said about wanting you by my side; that hasn't changed." He meets Charles' eyes, blue like the ocean, depths there that will be plumbed eventually, whether they will or no. But for the moment, as he bends over to kiss Charles, sliding a hand into his hair and tilting his head up, this is enough.

Charles blinks and the present rushes back in like a wave to the shore, Erik sitting on the floor leaning against the wall and looking up at him, wearing that ironic expression that never quite hides his expectation of pain.

"I'm not the man I was then," Charles reminds him, "and neither are you." For their own reasons, neither of them have any interest in nostalgia. "And you know it."

He leans forward, brushing his fingers down Erik's cheek, and Erik catches his hand in his and turns his head, kissing Charles' palm. There's no need to say what they both know, that they've changed since then, though not beyond recognition. That's not in them, for all that they're mutants. The men they were when they met would have despised them both, for different reasons.

"I chose this, Erik," Charles continues softly; "we both did. Don't get any ideas to the contrary."

At that, Erik cracks a smile, of the genus that only Charles ever sees, fond and harshly humorous. "As if you'd let me, Charles."

It's a joke, and Charles rolls his eyes exaggeratedly; they both know Charles loves Erik's mind too well to do any such thing. And in any case, he's ruthless now when he has to be, as tonight proved again, but he's grown far more cautious at the same time.

"Nonsense," Charles says lightly; "I quite like it when you take the initiative."

Erik actually laughs, and stands up. "I'll remember you said that," he murmurs, and Charles can't help but smile, reach out to weave his fingers through Erik's. They are, in every respect, as well-matched as ever.

Tomorrow, another new era is going to begin, whether anyone realizes it or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Charles quotes lines from Robert Lowell's ["The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"](http://starlady.dreamwidth.org/418871.html), one of my favorite poems and definitely something I think Charles would have been familiar with.


End file.
